And They Turned Not When They Went

Thrill Jockey;
2012

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Imbogodom's music can feel like walking inside a strange house at night and finding yourself momentarily startled by the sound of your own breath. Equal parts psych-folk songsmithery and musique concrète, the project came together when New Zealand's Daniel Beban, a multi-instrumentalist and tape artist, was chalking and splicing tape for a living at the BBC World Service. Intrigued by some discarded reel-to-reel tape machines he uncovered inside the station's studios, he began building compositions out of tape loops, and invited his guitarist friend Alexander Tucker to come jam.

Like their 2010 debut, The Metallic Year, the group's new record, And They Turned Not When They Went, reflects the slightly hallucinatory experiences that can arise from staying up very late at night and opening your ears. Recorded partly at the BBC's Bush House, and partly in a lighthouse in the marshy Dungeness region of Kent, it unfolds in a series of atmosphere-dripping vignettes, shuttling strangely and abruptly from ramshackle folk to astral ambience and the sounds of a bell striking the wee hours of the morning. And They Turned Not When They Went opens with the deep, resonant groan of London's Big Ben, gently folded into tape-manipulated whirs, loop-de-loops, and grinding drones.

But Imbogodom's music is more than just library-music clichés. Wherever they fall on the scale from abstraction to songcraft, the album's 10 tracks reflect a constant negotiation between sound manipulation and live instrumentation, or analog tape machine and guitar, cello, piano, vocals, drums, and any number of non-musical objects that one of the two members might happen to pick up. Songs trail off with cascading echoes that recall the transitions of dub music; notes are manipulated to take on new meaning.

The layered vocal line on album standout "Heir Looms", for example, is easily pretty enough to stand on its own, but it is all the more beautiful for the moments when it shifts abruptly, echoing into oblivion or pitched up an octave. Similar manipulations on "Welcome Away" transform a spoken word "wrong number" skit into a haunted phone call from the other side of the mirror, and extreme slowing of vox on tracks like "Etchum Buoy" and "I Am Here, I Am Gone" yields a cross between throat singing and the breathing of a sleeping creature. Listening to Imbogodom's second album, there's thefeeling that, beyond its interest as a technical exercise, speeding or slowing a given sound can set something free within it.

Not all of the sounds here are easy on the ears, and the music can encompass discomfort, even ugliness. Cello can sound warm and rich or exposed and raw; the loose-skinned, off-kilter drum patter and tuneless guitar picking on "Window Faces" sounds like an intentionally clumsy attempt at an acoustic marching band. You may not feel pleasure all the way through And They Turned Not When They Went, but if you're drawn to the bizarre, inconstant emotional terrain of late-night wakefulness, you'll find something honest.